It took two years of education and negotiation, but the ink is drying on the first aggregated power purchase agreement orchestrated under Walmart’s renewable energy acceleration for suppliers, officially known as Gigaton PPA.
The transaction covers an annual purchase of about 250,000 megawatt-hours of power from the Ørsted Sunflower Wind Farm in Marion County, Kansas, slated to come online this year. The buyers include Amy’s Kitchen, Great Lakes Cheese, Levi Strauss & Co., The J.M. Smucker Co. and Valvoline. Other terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The Gigaton PPA initiative, announced in early 2020 when the market for corporate PPAs was quite different, is part of the global retailer’s five-year-old Project Gigaton, which aims to help reduce or avoid 1 billion metric tons within Walmart’s value chain by 2030. Last month, Walmart announced that the roughly 4,500 suppliers who joined the program are more than halfway toward that goal.
The renewable power resource is a newer part of the effort, one that attracted more than 450 companies when it was first announced in 2020, according to officials responsible for managing the effort. The initiative centers on providing training and resources to help suppliers invest in renewable energy. "It was very timely for a lot of suppliers," said Zach Freeze, senior director of strategic initiatives, sustainability, at Walmart. "They were interested in getting into this world, and they didn’t know how."
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